As Slow and Transparent as Glass
by ebonyandunicorn
Summary: A set of non-chronological one-shots to complement my fic in progress, Intimate Strangers. After Nick Cutter entered the Permian anomaly with his wife and several soldiers, he never returned. For three years, he was assumed missing or dead, but the world he had left behind kept on turning without him. This fic chronicles some of the events that occurred prior to the start of IS.
1. March 17, 2006

**March 17, 2006 **

"Any change?" Claudia asked for the fifth time.

"No," Connor answered patiently, his eyes on the compass in his hand.

Claudia was beyond tense. She hadn't moved for an hour, standing in front of the shimmering rip in space-time through which Cutter had disappeared with several soldiers and his wife. _One hour._ How long had they been expecting it to take? The Permian was huge, after all, and who knew where the future anomaly they sought had opened up? Maybe Helen had been lying, and there wasn't a future anomaly at all. Maybe the future creatures they'd taken with them wouldn't be able to find it. Maybe it had closed...

_Don't think about that_. Claudia forced her mind away from the direction of closing anomalies. She remembered asking Cutter moments before he had left: "_What if the anomaly closes while you're on the other side?"_ His answer had been typical, really: "_We wait until it reopens." _They had food, water, shelter. They could have stayed on the other side for a month or more. Claudia didn't like the thought of Cutter sharing a tent with his wife for that amount of time, but it couldn't really be helped.

"Hold on..." Connor said slowly, holding the compass out in front of him.

"What?" Claudia was at his side in a second. Abby and Stephen were quick to glance over his shoulder too, and even Lester tore himself away from the tree he had been leaning on to have a look.

"Nothing," Connor said quickly, stuffing the compass into his pocket. "I just thought it... wobbled a bit, that's all."

"And did it?" Claudia demanded. "Is it getting weaker?"

"I don't know… maybe a bit. Just a bit, though. It's not in danger of closing yet."

_Yet_. Claudia closed her eyes briefly, but when she did, all she could see was Nick walking through the anomaly beside Helen, possibly never to return.

* * *

"Claudia, come and sit down for a little bit. You've been standing up for ages. Aren't your feet tired?"

"What?" Claudia was only half-focused on Abby's words; the other half of her mind was thinking over every interaction she and Nick Cutter had ever shared. They said that every moment in your life flashed before your eyes as you were dying... What did that mean, then? Their first kiss at the bar; the second in the hotel; the third – their last – only hours ago, in almost this very spot. Cutter saving her life countless times, and the lives of so many others. The banter they'd shared back and forth for months, so clever, always hiding the truth of the moment behind witty words – but they had never talked about their feelings for each other. There had always been something in the way: a creature, an anomaly... his wife.

"Come and sit down," Abby repeated. "Eat something. They'll be back soon, and you know Cutter wouldn't want you to exhaust yourself waiting. Come on." She took Claudia's hand and led the woman away from the anomaly to where the others were sitting in the dirt, eating. Claudia walked sideways so that she always kept the anomaly in the corner of her eye; she was terrified that if she looked away, it would disappear. She was almost too scared to blink.

Abby fed her, but she hardly tasted whatever it was she ate. The others were talking in low voices, about the weather, the news, politics, whatever – it could have been anything, and Claudia would not have been interested. She watched the anomaly shimmer in the air. She waited.

The hours stretched on, and on, and on. Night fell. Lester checked his watch. Stephen paced anxiously around the clearing. Connor pulled the compass from his pocket, checked it, put it back, pulled it out again. A headache began to pound behind Claudia's eyes. _Where are you_? she thought, silently, desperately. _Leave the creatures. Leave Helen. Come back to me_.

She looked away from the anomaly only when she heard shouting. Stephen and Lester were talking off to the side. "He's my friend!" Stephen was saying. "God damn it, he's been gone for hours. Anything could have happened. Please, just let me go to him."

"Out of the question," Lester said flatly. "If something has happened, we've lost enough men as it is." He saw Claudia looking and gestured emphatically at her. "Tell him!"

Claudia looked at Stephen and the words stuck in her throat. She wanted to say, _Go to him_. She wanted to say, _Take me too_. She wanted to tell Lester where he could shove his instructions and protocols. She opened her mouth to speak.

Connor cried out.

Claudia turned, knowing, already, what she would see. The anomaly was moving, shifting, convulsing – bigger and smaller and bigger and smaller – and smaller – and smaller –

Stephen threw himself forward.

Claudia screamed.

* * *

She went back the next day, and the day after that.

She returned to the clearing. The first flowers of spring were blooming, late this year – the scent of them stuck in her nose as she walked along the forest paths to where they'd set up a camp, waiting for the anomaly to reopen. The soldier on duty nodded at her, but she barely noticed him. She stood in the same spot where she had the night before, staring at the empty space in front of her, mirroring the space in her heart. She paced, around and around as Stephen had, or walking back and forward over the spot where the anomaly had been, as though she could return it to the clearing if she agitated the soil above which it had hovered, if she only tried hard enough. Sometimes she was there for hours, and sometimes Stephen would join her. They never spoke, though, not wanting to voice the awful thoughts they both shared, not wanting to intrude upon the layer of grief surrounding each other's hearts.

After a week, she stopped visiting every day. After a month, she stopped visiting at all. The memory of that day became too painful, and she saw the place in her dreams almost every night anyway. She remained frozen, though, unable to forget, unable to move forward into the future that Cutter had been searching for. Abby and Connor and Lester were scared for her, she knew. Stephen coped with his grief in other ways, throwing himself into the anomaly project, picking fights with dinosaurs ten times his size just to have something to occupy his mind. Claudia, though, would zone out at her desk, lost in recollection, sometimes for hours at a time. More than once Lester suggested that she should quit the anomaly project altogether... but that felt wrong somehow, like she would be insulting his memory by doing so.

After two months they cleared out his office. She went with Stephen to sort through papers, journals, books stacked three feet high. There were memories here, too – joking sexual harassment accusations and questions Cutter hadn't wanted to answer. Eventually they just packed everything up and sent it to Stephen's house to sit in boxes until Cutter returned. Claudia kept his house off the market for as long as she could, but eventually Lester and Dr Shepard and the others convinced her to let it go. She visited it once before she did, though, in case there was anything precious that he would have wanted kept. In case there was anything she could keep, to remind herself of him.

After half a year she began to recover. Sessions with Dr Shepard were helping more than Claudia had expected; hiring her had been one of Lester's cleverer ideas. There were still nights when she was haunted with visions of what they now called 'future predators', but they were becoming few and far between. She put more effort in at work, even went out once or twice with friends. She met Jem. She began to smile again.

After one year she returned to the Forest of Dean. They'd abandoned that camp after the invention of the Anomaly Detection Device, since they would be able to tell remotely when – if – the anomaly there ever reopened. There was nothing at all to mark the place, no warning sign or stone, but Claudia knew exactly where it was. She knelt there and left flowers, as a memorial, as on a grave.


	2. May 26, 2006

**May 26, 2006**

There was nobody, not even Claudia, who could understand how he felt. For while Claudia might like Nick as much as or more than he did, Claudia was not mourning for the second time, and she was not mourning two people. The last time Stephen Hart had felt grief this strong, it had been after the unexplained disappearance of Helen Cutter. This time her disappearance had been very much explained, but it didn't make things any easier, and this time Nick was gone too.

Last time had been bad because he hadn't been able to speak about it with anyone. Nick had retreated into himself, barely talking at all for days at a time, and even when they had spoken it was about the most superficial and practical of things. They hadn't been close enough back then for either of them to open up to the other... and even if they had been, it wasn't as though Stephen could truly explain the depths of his feelings. She was, after all, his wife.

This time was the same thing all over again. Just when Stephen had thought he was finally putting the affair with Helen behind him, she appeared again and made it clear that she was far from finished with him. To his horror, he'd realised that he had not wanted to be finished with her, either. After eight years he had thought he was finally getting over her, but the moment she'd returned and kissed him he had discovered just how untrue that was. He had missed her.

And now, he was in mourning. He did not believe for a second that either Helen or Nick were dead, no matter how much the therapist might have been attempting to convince him to move on, and it made things difficult on a number of levels. For one thing, Abby, after months of skirting around, had asked him out today. He'd turned her down.

Nobody had blamed him, of course. Even Abby, after apologising profusely and then going off to sulk, had said she'd understood. He had told her, as he would tell the others if they asked, that he just wasn't in a position to have a romantic relationship right now. She, and the others, would assume that it was because of his grief for Nick. Stephen was very happy for them to think that, even if it wasn't strictly true.

He missed them both. God, he missed them. He missed Nick, his closest friend of eight years; missed the days when the only things they had to worry about were university students and faculty meetings; missed the field trips they would take together, the way Nick's eyes would light up when he was talking about a new theory or discovery. He missed the discussions they would share late into the night, camping out or drinking whiskey at each other's houses, about life and evolution and the universe and time. He even missed the excitement of working on the anomaly project with him, even if – as they now knew well – it had been so incredibly dangerous. They were a good team, and they could have handled almost anything the anomalies threw at them. Except this.

And he missed Helen, though he had not seen her for more than a few days in the last eight years. He missed having her as a supervisor all those years ago, the long nights spent at the Cutter house working on his projects alongside two of the most outstanding minds in his field. He missed the thrill of their secret affair, the need for silence and absolute secrecy and how much better and sharper that made everything. He missed, if he was being honest, Helen in bed; she had been _so_ much better than the fumbling undergraduates who were always swarming around him.

He felt bad for it, honestly. Each time Nick had brought up his wife over the last years he had flinched and turned away to hide his suddenly fast-beating heart. He had been terrified of discovery and, as the years progressed and he and Nick had grown closer, he had become regretful. Stephen would have taken it all back if he could have, just so he wouldn't have to break Nick's heart one day. Now, though, with the memory of Helen's lips lingering even months after she had disappeared, he was remembering why he had begun the affair in the first place, and what had made it so good.

So Stephen dealt with his feelings the only way he knew how – by throwing himself into his work. He tracked dinosaurs, rescued terrified people, argued with Lester, attempted to make sense of Nick's theories and research alongside Connor. He watched Claudia withdraw into herself, coping with her grief in the opposite way to him. He knew that she had been in love with Nick, and he tried to use that to justify his own feelings for Helen, but it was different somehow. Helen had left them for eight years. Nick had been his friend for all of that time.

Months passed. Abby recovered from his rejection and they remained friends, though she somehow remained utterly oblivious to Connor's feelings for her. They moved out of Home Office and into CARI, and gradually Connor's research team began to move closer and closer to unlocking the secrets of the anomalies. Stephen remained the head of the field team for a long time, fighting away his grief through running and shooting and tracking and hunting. Claudia, very gradually, began to recover. He helped her clean out Nick's office, but left her to his house. There were too many memories in that place for him.

Months passed. The team moved on. They coped without Nick as best they could. Each of them still grieved for him, and Stephen was no exception. He also, though, grieved for Nick's wife, and that set him apart and made everything ten times worse.


End file.
